Atwood's 1996 novel, Alias Grace, centers on a real-life figure: Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant who, along with a fellow servant, was convicted of double murder in 1843. Three decades after the controversial ruling, Marks was exonerated. In the afterword to her novel, Atwood wrote:

The details were sensational: Grace Marks was uncommonly pretty and also extremely young; Kinnear's housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, had previously given birth to an illegitimate child and was Thomas Kinnear's mistress; at her autopsy she was found to be pregnant. Grace and her fellow servant James McDermott had run away to the United States together and were assumed by the press to be lovers. The combination of sex, violence and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes was most attractive to the journalists of the day.